PHP set timeout for script with system call, set_time_limit not working

Question

I have a command-line PHP script that runs a wget request using each member of an array with foreach. This wget request can sometimes take a long time so I want to be able t

Answer 1

You can use a combination of "--timeout" and time(). Start off by figuring out how much time you have total, and lower the --timeout as your script runs.

For example:

$endtime = time()+15;
foreach( $url as $key => $value){
  $timeleft = $endtime - time();
  if($timeleft > 0) {
    $wget = "wget -t 1 --timeout $timeleft $otherwgetflags $value";
    print "running $wget
";
    system($wget);
  } else {
    print("timed out!");
    exit(0);
  }
}

Note: if you don't use -t, wget will try 20 times, each waiting --timeout seconds.

Here's some example code using proc_open/proc_terminate (@Josh's suggestion):

$descriptorspec = array(
   0 => array("pipe", "r"),
   1 => array("pipe", "w"),
   2 => array("pipe", "w")
);
$pipes = array();

$endtime = time()+15;
foreach( $url as $key => $value){
  $wget = "wget $otherwgetflags $value";
  print "running $wget\n";
  $process = proc_open($wget, $descriptorspec, $pipes);
  if (is_resource($process)) {
    do {
      $timeleft = $endtime - time();
      $read = array($pipes[1]);
      stream_select($read, $write = NULL, $exeptions = NULL, $timeleft, NULL);
      if(!empty($read)) {
        $stdout = fread($pipes[1], 8192);
        print("wget said--$stdout--\n");
      }
    } while(!feof($pipes[1]) && $timeleft > 0);
    if($timeleft <= 0) {
      print("timed out\n");
      proc_terminate($process);
      exit(0);
    }
  } else {
    print("proc_open failed\n");
  }
}